Tag Archives: animation

This Animated Music Video Feels Like Watching an Edgar Allen Poe Poem

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A haunting animation of expressionist illustrations fill out the somber sound of American ambient recording artist, Eluvium, a.k.a., Matthew Cooper. The new music video for his single, “Regenerative Being,” is a seven-minute display of morbid looping vignettes directed and illustrated by Ukrainian animator and comic book artist Stas Santimov. Together, Cooper and Santimov fleshed out a concept for a video wherein a curious man finds himself in a strange place where everything is pre-planned for him by someone awaiting his arrival. Santimov tells Creators that the music video, like many of his previous animated comics, explores “strange people’s behaviors” through a linear narrative that consists mainly of looped scenes.

The story began to take on a more specific shape when Santimov … Read the rest

Meriem Bennani’s Surreal Life

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In this episode of Like Art, Moroccan-born artist Meriem Bennani takes us on one of her inspiration walks in New York City. Bennani creates short, absurdist videos based on appropriated and manipulated footage, which playfully undermine our assumptions about reality. She is also known for creating Fardaous Funjab, avant-garde hijab designer, a character who challenges Western views on Islamic culture. Bennani introduces host Oz Woloshyn to her world, revealing the way pleasure and humor inspire her work.… Read the rest

Dancer Takes Zero-Gravity Flight to Create 3D Dance Performance

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Dance, like almost everything in life, is possible precisely because of gravity. French artists Paul Marlier and Jeanne Morel, however, wondered what would happen to a dancer in the weightless space created during a zero-gravity flight. With the help of the French space agency CNES, Marlier and Morel’s Vulpes Vulpes studio went up in Novespace’s parabolic flight, Air Zero G, above French territory. The plan was to, as Morel tells Creators, materialize a dance while weightless. Then, the pair added another dimension to the multimedia dance project, appropriately titled _Synesthesia, by using a Microsoft Kinect and Fastmocap software to create what is essentially an animated 3D sculpture of Morel’s dancing across time and space.

“I wondered about the imprint left by dance and … Read the rest

[NSFW] In the Future, Humans Mate with Jellyfish and It’s Hard to Describe What Happens Next (Without Vomiting)

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The cost of immortality is a tendency toward brutal sex á la the Japanese tradition of Guro in French animator Jeanne Boukraa’s newly-released animation, With Joy and Merriness. In fact, all everyday activities have devolved into depravity and violence, from Mom chopping vegetables and kids playing jump rope to some of the most savage bedroom scenes we’ve seen since the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The film’s premise is that humanity spliced our genes with those of an undying jellyfish. Once we couldn’t die, we became completely desensitized to the value of human life. Boukraa bills the film as an “experimental documentary where we observe, through every day scenes, the degeneration of a society where the rise of technology leeds the population … Read the rest

8-Minute Video Boils Down the Essence of Animation Legend Ralph Bakshi

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Few animators have busted down as many doors for indie animation as Ralph Bakshi. In 1968 he left a position in Paramount’s animation department to found Bakshi Productions, and has pumped out gritty, rude, and iconic films ever since. The average viewer will likely remember his take on The Lord of the Rings, but a new video essay from The Royal Ocean Film Society unpacks the rough bounty of his entire filmography, asking the question, “What’s the essence of a Ralph Bakshi film?”

Through a series of vignettes and mashups, narrator Andy Saladino ties together the sights and sounds that appear in all of Bakshi’s films. Stories about troubled creatives in even more troubled cities line up with tales of fantastical barbarians or … Read the rest